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Does google adwords affect your natural search ranking?

Does Google Adwords have some factor in the Google natural search algorithms?
I recently shut down my adwords campaigns and within one week my ranking for keywords all went down 1 to 2 notches.
I was number one for every conceivable keyword for over a year and now am #2 or #3. And I by far have the most authoratative website, best content and most links in my respective niches.
There isn't much else left to conclude other than that Google is money hungry and if you end your adwords campaigns it will factor into your ranking.
And if you had a rather large adwords budget like mine, they will call you daily to try and get you back - what's funy here is after 1 week they stopped calling and immediately my rankings all dropped 1 or two positions - I wonder if they did that so I would get concerned and call back or start my campaign back up.
PR has stayed the same and remains unaffected by this, though. What are your thoughts on this. Google has far too much power - maybe a few of us on Digital Point here should get together and create the next big thing that topples Google just like they toppled Altavista?

I've seen people in various places claim that google deliberatley manipulate results to make them less relevant for some or other motive. I think those people overlook one major fact - google maintains it's position as the most popular search engine as long as searchers find what they are looking for.
To deliberately make searches less relevant would only risk sending them to other search engines and so would be a very bad business decision.

Actually, I am quite sure it does. A friend of mine and I share a blog and we just cut the adsense from it and the exact same thing happened. No change in PR, different host account, and same drop in ratings. Apparently the drop is more centered around the main keywords. Not as much around long tail. This further goes to show that adwords does play some roll in Google's search algorithm. Try it yourself.

Actually, I am quite sure it does. A friend of mine and I share a blog and we just cut the adsense from it and the exact same thing happened. No change in PR, different host account, and same drop in ratings. Apparently the drop is more centered around the main keywords. Not as much around long tail. This further goes to show that adwords does play some roll in Google's search algorithm. Try it yourself.

I have a theory that the ad text on the content network is somehow spidered by google and it considers it anchor text.

I have no proof but others I've spoken to agree that this could be the case.

It might also explain why you dropped in the serps, since the serps are so much more dynamic now anyway than they used to be.

Click to expand...

The ads are javascript. The spiders don't crawl javascript, so it shouldn't be a factor.

SERPs change almost constantly, so it's hard to tell what effect, if any, Adwords would have on your SERP for given keywords. It would probably take some lengthy studying to find semi-accurate results. Ofcourse, you have no idea what your competition is doing to change their SERP, so your results of said study would always be skewed.